THEODORE ROOSEVELT (1858-1919)
By Dale L. Walker

“IF I HADN’T GONE TO DAKOTA,” Theodore Roosevelt said late in his life, “I would never have become president.”

The implications of this powerful statement defy imagining: If he had not ventured West there might not have been a Panama Canal? No trust-busting, “Big Stick” diplomacy, Food and Drug laws, or reclamation acts? No 125 million acres of national forests, fewer national parks and monuments? No “T.R.” to remind us of the days when patriotism, pride of country, and optimism for the future were characteristic of Americans everywhere?

A born and bred New Yorker whose Dutch forebears were among the earliest of Manhattan’s settlers, Theodore Roosevelt’s other roots, the Western ones, were much deeper than even his closest associates realized.

They were planted in September 1883, when he stepped off the train at the Little Missouri station in Dakota Territory, to join in a buffalo hunt north of the remote town of Medora (in today’s south-western North Dakota).

If I hadn’t gone to Dakota, I would never have become president.

Five months after he returned to New York to resume his work as a state assemblyman, his mother died of typhoid fever and less than 12 hours later, his wife, Alice Lee, died of kidney disease just two days after giving birth to their daughter.

That summer of 1884 he returned to the Dakota grasslands to lose himself among the Westerners he had grown to admire. The cowboys there were endlessly amused by his Harvard mannerisms, the fact that he neither smoked nor drank hard liquor, and that his idea of rough language was to shout “By Godfrey!” and an occasional “Damn!”

He took their jokes with good humor, and they learned to like the barrel-chested man with the big grin, brushy mustache, his pince nez eyeglasses, and his outlandish outfit of fringed buckskin shirt and trousers and broad sombrero. They admired a dude who came out from New York City, took good care of his horses, asked a million questions, and ate the same chuck and slept under the same stars they did.

That summer and fall of 1884 he came alive again after a period of deep depression following the tragedies at home. He wrote of his renewed strength and energy, of buffalo and elk hunts, of a day when he was 13 hours in the saddle.

The land and its people saved his life, he said. In letters to friends back east, Roosevelt daydreamed of military glory and some opportunity to lead men into battle. He wrote that in the event of war he would “raise some companies of horse riflemen” from among “the harum-scarum rough riders of the West.”

He got his chance in the spring of 1898 when war was declared against Spain. He resigned as Assistant Secretary of the Navy and raised a volunteer cavalry regiment for service in Cuba, drawing the majority of his troopers from the territorial Westerners who flooded to recruiting stations—cowboys, especially—together with an assortment of lawmen (even a few jail-birds), and fiddle-footed vagabonds. These he mixed with some of his eastern dude friends—Harvard, Yale, and Princeton men the Westerners called the “lah-de-dah boys”—and trained them briefly in San Antonio, where they were known as “Teddy’s Terrors.”

The rest, of course, is history: The 600 Rough Riders suffered the heaviest casualty rate of any regiment present in the brief Cuban campaign, Roosevelt led the charge up San Juan Hill, and kept riding—directly to the White House.

To Senator Mark Hannah, Theodore Roosevelt, hero of the Rough Riders, was a dangerous man—cocky, impetuous, progressive, full of antibusiness notions.

After William McKinley was elected President in 1901, Hannah reminded his fellow Ohioan what would happen if he should die in office: “Look what we’ve got! That damned cowboy is President of the United States!”

On September 6, 1901, six months into his second term of office, McKinley was shot by an anarchist in Buffalo, N.Y., and died on the 14th. That day, the “damned cowboy,” not yet 43 years old, became the 26th, and youngest, president of the United States.

“If I hadn’t gone to Dakota...” Roosevelt would not have changed America.

Dale L. Walker lives in El Paso, Texas

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